Humanity needs our help!

Benefitted by three centuries of relentless technological progress primarily geared towards human advancement, humanity now wields capabilities that might seem godlike—possessing the potential to shape the very world we rely upon for our sustenance.

Unfortunately, progress in cultivating the wisdom, awareness, and moral guidance necessary to wield technology's power has failed to keep pace.

As long as we have more power than collective intelligence to direct technology’s impact, technology can become a decentralized weapon, causing harm at any scale.

This is the “Metacrisis” facing humanity, and there is no better example of how the Metacrisis manifests itself than climate change.

The $105 trillion/year global economy is lurching toward a regenerative future, but it's moving in fits and starts with limited tangible progress. Moloch is at the heart of the problem.

Moloch — a system of bad incentives, negative sum games, unhealthy competition, and misaligned incentives — results in a widespread lack of trust and limits coordination within the system. It blocks alignment on effective transition strategies and perpetuates a continuous race to the bottom, serving to exacerbate growing human and environmental crises around the globe.

The Opportunity

Given the stakes, encompassing the global economy and the prosperity of billions, the opportunity before us is monumental. Digital Gaia's mission is to offer a transformative path through this challenge. As pioneers in developing open infrastructure and tools, we enable the seamless integration of Planetary Intelligence into global decision-making.

Our mission opens doors for sharing insights and knowledge, grounding decisions in the realms of profit, planet, and people—ultimately steering us toward an adaptive and sustainable future for all.

Our open platform and toolkit are designed to aid pioneering leaders in responsible and sustainable enterprises, enabling them to formulate, manage, and oversee the critical decisions that steer transition strategies.

Our Project:

Our project for the GR19 Climate Solutions grant round is a natural extension of all previous Digital Gaia Gitcoin proposals, the last of which was a Beta round project focused on launching a science-based Co-Pilot to defeat Moloch and regenerate the planet.

Building on the core tech stack developed and proven with the help of previous rounds, we will launch an Open Source Ecosystem of science and tech organizations collaborating to create a universal system for decentralized planetary-scale modeling, decision-making, and automation. Our goal is to help humanity address 21st-century challenges like climate change and AI alignment, fostering a positive future for our planet.

Our vision is that humanity will use this infrastructure as a civilization-wide shared neocortex for Planetary Intelligence, enabling us to overcome the existential risks of the 21st century, from climate to AI alignment, and transition into a planet-positive species.

Planned Milestones:

• October 2023: Gaia Protocol Request for Comments published; “how it works” visuals and animations.
• December 2023:
  • Complete Gaia Protocol v1.0 published and reviewed
  • launch of Gaia Ecosystem funding program, which will direct funding towards the development of Gaia-aligned technologies, using “bootstrapped” Gaia-aligned decision-making systems.
• Mid-2024: Complete, open-source reference implementation supporting integrated decision-making across multiple real-world actors and contexts in at least one domain. This implementation can include (pieces of) TimeLike, Fangorn, and other systems as required.
• End of 2024: Launch general-purpose Gaia OS for Planetary Intelligence

Resources and Background

Key References

• The Gaia Attractor - For broader context.
• dTwins: Decentralized Digital Twins for science, engineering and decision-making at scale. Digital Gaia Vision
• Natural Intelligence: the Gaia architecture [v2 draft - April 2023]. 2023.
• https://github.com/gaia-os/fangorn. Ongoing “v0” implementation of the Gaia architecture envisioned. Significant limitations remain, but it’s a good starting point and starting to be used in real-world use cases, which will help inform the evolution of the overall protocol.
• Simulation-Enabled Collective Intelligence: A Near-Term-Achievable Strategy for Creating a Global-Scale Collective Superintelligence, Steve Coy, Rafael Kaufmann, June 2023 DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.20236.08320 (white paper)
• On-Demand Auto-Generation of Predictive Digital Twins for Cyber-Physical Systems, Steve Coy, September 2021 DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.34496.71688 Conference: NAFEMS World Congress 2021
• Combining Heterogeneous Models, Steve Coy, March 2017 DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.11008.61441 Conference: NAFEMS Multiscale and Multiphysics Modeling & Simulation - Innovation Enabling Technologies 2017